It's the little things in life

Yvonne Nicholls with one of her wood carvings from Bangkok, where she lived for 10 years with her husband.
Picture: Cathryn Tremain

Yvonne Nicholls is one of few people to have an ant named after them. Mary Ryllis Clark reports.

Yvonne Nicholls thrives on entertaining an audience, even though speaking in public is most people's greatest fear, almost as bad, it is said, as death and divorce. On the receiving end, Nicholls's public get more than they bargain for - her two special subjects are ants and sex.

Nicholls's fascination with ants began in the 1940s during World War II when her husband, Frank, a scientist with the CSIRO, was sent to London to set up the Australian and New Zealand Scientific Liaison Office. "I went, too, very much against their will," says Nicholls, "but I said I would rather die with Frank than live without him." On their way to London and on the way home to Australia, they travelled via the United States where they were entertained by Professor Carl Haskins, a scientist and a member of president Franklin Roosevelt's staff.

"He was extremely kind to us," says Nicholls, "and I told him I would like to send him a gift from Australia.

" 'Hur-nee,' he said in his deep southern drawl, 'ma heart's desire is to have a livin' cawlony of Ustraalian bull ants.'

"I don't know how to do that.

" 'All ya gotta do is collect a ferdilised queen and some workers.'

"How can I tell a fertilised queen?

" 'Simple. A ferdilised queen's the biggest and has nooow wings.' "

Back in Melbourne, Nicholls's husband introduced her to John Clark, a colleague at the CSIRO who had classified more ants than any other myrmecologist in the world. "He told me that 8000 ants had been classified worldwide, of which 4000 were in Australia," says Nicholls. "Armed with a tiny pair of tweezers and an enema - you sucked up the ants into the rubber tube then disgorged them - he took me out into the bush many times over the next two years and showed me how to collect and classify. He was the best teacher in the world." One day, at Turton's Pass deep in the Otway Ranges, Nicholls came across a small ant she didn't recognise. "John asked me what species it was and I couldn't answer. 'You should be ashamed of yourself,' he said. He had a closer look and cried, 'Good lord, you've discovered a new species!' " He named it monomorian yvonnii.

Nicholls eventually found her fertilised bull ant queen and workers, boxed them up in sterilised soil and posted them, after acquiring an export permit, to America. "Family arrived. All dead," telegraphed Haskins. The same thing happened a second time but, finally, John Clark's daughter, on a visit to the US, successfully delivered a community of bull ants on Nicholls's behalf.

A tiny, elegant figure with sharp eyes and a halo of white hair, Nicholls has just celebrated her 90th birthday. A born communicator, she strokes a fist-wide silver sculpture of an ant with a tail of crystal as she retells her story. She and Frank saw the sculpture in a shop window in Mildura some years ago. "We went in and asked the price and were horrified. Later, after I had given my lecture, I got back to the hotel and found Frank had bought it for me."

The Nicholls's flat in Armadale is crammed with exotic objects they have collected in their 64 years together. The statue of Ganesha, for example, is from India, the hand-woven wall hanging from Ragistan and the classically beautiful head of a boy from Italy.

In 1959, on Frank's next overseas assignment after London, Yvonne learnt of the circumstances of women in Pakistan. "A friend living in Karachi working at the YWCA told me they needed someone to teach English and to set up a library. It meant that through an interpreter I could meet and talk to the poorer local women who spoke no English. I found the only thing they really wanted to know was how to avoid having children, especially those who had to work.

"The poorer women were far more anxious for change than the richer ones who spoke English. The latter supported the status quo: they spent much of their time sitting around eating sweets and complaining that their husbands wanted them to come out of purdah. They resisted change. Several of the wealthy women told me that when they were tired of sex, they would choose another wife for their husbands. Working women, on the other hand, had to remove their veils in order to see what they were doing. If a man saw their faces, they (the women) were punished."

Thus began Nicholls's enthralment with the sexual mores of other cultures and religions. Subsequent visits to more than 15 countries gave her enough material to develop her brilliant lecture titled The Fascinating History of Sex.

"My talk focuses on what I call sacred, sensual and sinful sex," says Nicholls. "In sacred sex, for example, I describe rituals such as group sex in the fields, which was a fertility rite practised by the Incas in South America. When I talk about sensual sex I cite cultures such as ancient Rome where wives were the faithful watchdogs and married men sought beauty and sexual stimulation in their mistresses. Sinful sex, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition, comes from the view of Eve as temptress."

Nicholls has given this lecture numerous times over the past decades but remembers with particular glee one occasion when she stood up to address a group of junior executives from the world of printing - about 50 men and one woman. They had wanted Bettina Arndt. They were not expecting to be riveted by a woman in her 80s talking to them about sex. As it turned out, the woman old enough to be their grandmother enlightened, entertained and occasionally even shocked them.